(Work) In which mklink gives me back my hard disk space

I’m always getting frustrated by little problems at work. One by one they are tiny but gradually they add up. Especially if they happen again and again every day! Running out of hard disk space on my C: drive on one of my machines is one of the ones which continually reoccurs. Usually it’s right in the middle of a productive moment, it breaks my concentration, and it fails a test I am running with a false result. Even after I delete the known obvious suspect wastes of space I still only get back up to 12 GB free, and I know it’s going to happen again the day after tomorrow.

Today I suddenly realized there’s a not-quite-solution-but-major-mitigation that’s been staring me in the face – symbolic links! But how did I get into this sorry state anyway? Isn’t hard drive disk space dirt cheap these days? I honestly don’t remember the reason , but when I set up this machine, even though it has two lovely 500GB hard drives, I set my OS partition on C: to be only 60GB. Probably it was a moment of idiocy.

And the tools I am using during testing are hardcoded to write a lot of junk to certain folders like C:\x.

Today after I got home from work and could finally relax I realized that
a) I have this big 400GB chunk of space on my first hard drive I am not using, which can act as drive E:… and
b) I can use mklink to treat this space as C:\x.

Now my out-of-hard disk spaces should only happen every few weeks instead of every 2 days - yeah!

It looks like this:

mkdir E:\BitBucket_X
pushd C:\
rmdir /s /q
mklink –D X E:\BitBucket_X

Now I can’t wait to not see that error message again. (Literally?)